Very high cycle fatigue of duplex stainless steels and stress intensity calculations

Abstract: Very high cycle fatigue (VHCF) is generally considered as the domain of fatigue lifetime beyond 10 million (107) load cycles. Few examples of structural components which are subjected to 107-109 load cycles during their service life are engine parts, turbine disks, railway axles and load-carrying parts of automobiles. Therefore, the safe and reliable operation of these components depends on the knowledge of their fatigue strength and the prevalent damage/failure mechanisms. Moreover, the fatigue life of materials in the VHCF regime is controlled by the fatigue crack initiation and early growth stage of short cracks.This study was focussed on the evaluation of fatigue properties of duplex stainless steels in the VHCF regime using the ultrasonic fatigue testing equipment. The ultrasonic fatigue tests were conducted on the cold rolled duplex stainless strip steel and hot rolled duplex stainless steel grades. Two different geometries of ultrasonic fatigue test specimens were tested. Considerable attention was devoted to the evaluation of fatigue crack initiation and growth mechanisms using the high resolution scanning electron microscopy. The fatigue crack initiation was found to be surface initiated phenomena in all the tested grades, albeit different in each case.The second part of this thesis work was the development of a distributed dislocation dipole technique for the analysis of multiple straight, kinked and branched cracks in an elastic half plane. Cracks with dimensions much smaller than the overall size of the domain were considered. The main goal of the development of this technique was the evaluation of stress intensity factor at each crack tip. The comparison of results from the stress intensity factor evaluation by the developed procedure and the well-established Finite Element Method software ABAQUS showed difference of less than 1% for Jacobi polynomial expansion of sixth order in the dipole density representation.